Group

Here is an important article that does not appear to have been webbed
anywhere, namely Darwinist philosopher David Hull's `hatchet job' review
of Phillip E. Johnson's "Darwin on Trial".

I will reference this in my "Articles posted to CED"
(http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/cedartic.html)

Steve

PS: See tagline for Johnson's comment on Hull's review. Here is a snippet:

"Faced with answering a critique of the scientific evidence for
Darwinism, the reviewer for Nature, the most prestigious organ of
the scientific establishment, changes the subject and brings God
directly into the argument."

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NATURE VOL 352 8 AUGUST 1991 485-486

The God of the Galapagos

David L. Hull

Darwin on Trial. By Phillip E. Johnson. Regnery Gateway, 1130 17t
Streets NW Washington DC 20036, USA: 1991. Pp.195. $19.95.

IN any area of science, at any one time, there will be numerous issues
about which there is unanimity of opinion, a few mavericks
notwithstanding. However, scientists spend most of their time at the
frontiers of their discipline where genuine disagreement is commonplace.
Periodically, they also have to backtrack to reevaluate some tenet that they
had all taken for granted for years. Evolutionary biologists are no
exception. They agree that species evolve, but they disagree both about the
evolutionary process and about specific phylogenies. How important is
natural selection in contrast to sexual selection, drift, molecular drive, and
so on? Is speciation usually punctuational or do species frequently change
en masse over long periods of time? How close is Archaeopteryx to the
fork in the phylogenetic tree that led from ancient reptiles to birds on the
one hand, and present-day reptiles on the other? Are human beings more
closely related to chimpanzees than to gorillas or vice versa?

---
God Creating Adam: might the God implied by evolution be even more
terrifying than the one in William Blake's myth-making cameos?
---

The same divergence of opinion can be found among scientists about proper
scientific method. Some voice extremely empirical, inductivist views of science.
Science is an accumulation of facts without any recourse to theoretical
speculation. Others see a role for hypotheses in science as long as they are
testable in a very strict sense. To count at all, data must be totally
independent of the hypotheses that they are designed to test. Others see
science as a much more complicated affair. The goal of science is to
produce reliable knowledge, but no cut-and-dried method exists that can
guarantee success. Because scientific knowledge is so interdependent,
rarely is evidence totally independent of the hypotheses that it is used to
test. As dogmatic as scientists can be at times they are committed to
fallibilism. Not only may they be mistaken, but quite frequently they are.

In Darwin on Trial, Phillip Johnson, a former law clerk for Chief Justice
Earl Warren and professor of law at the University of California at
Berkeley, exploits the complex, fallibilist character of science in general
and evolutionary biology in particular to urge equal time for his religious
convictions. He is not a creationist in the sense that he thinks God
miraculously created all species in six days some ten thousand years ago,
but he does believe that any purely naturalistic explanation of the creation
of life on Earth and the emergence of human beings is inadequate. Instead,
as a "philosophical theist and a Christian" he believes that God brought all
living things into being to further His own purpose, possibly by creation
from nothing, possibly in the way that contemporary evolutionists claim.

Johnson has read much of the semi-popular literature and several texts on
evolutionary biology, chiefly the works of Stephen Jay Gould, Richard
Dawkins and Douglas Futuyma. He runs through the usual objections to
Darwinian versions of evolutionary theory-the lack of transitionals in the
fossil record, the sudden explosion of complex life forms at the beginning
of the Cambrian age, the difficulty of explaining the origin of the genetic
code, the limits to change shown by breeding experiments, the 'hopeful
monster' controversy, the punctuated equilibrium controversy, or the
importance of catastrophic extinctions". In his discussions, he presents the
usual caricatures of evolutionary biology, only to take them back after they
have had their effect, a ploy that seems to be common in courts of law. An
attorney will go on at some length about the sex habits of a witness only to
end with the admission that such issues really do not bear on the crime
being alleged. Johnson runs through the familiar objection that survival of
the fittest is a tautology, only to conclude that on certain interpretations it
is not. Of course, by then, the damage has been done. The reader is left
with the impression that this principle is in some sense suspect

Johnson spends most of his book arguing that the case for evolution is not
proven. In fact, it is so shaky he is led to ask why so many people,
including experts whose intelligence and intellectual integrity he respects,
can be so blind. Even those scientists who are most vocal in their criticisms
of current versions of evolutionary theory acknowledge the very tenet that
bothers Johnson the most-the belief that species evolve. For example the
French zoologist Pierre Grasse and the German geneticist Richard
Goldschmidt object in no uncertain terms to several basic tenets of
Darwinism, but neither of these men express any doubts that evolution has
occurred.

More recently, Colin Patterson caused quite a flap when he presented a
paper at the American Museum of Natural History in which he suggested
that looking at character distributions without assuming evolution might be
a productive research strategy. But when Johnson pushed him on the issue
he admitted that he continues to accept evolution as the "only conceivable
explanation for certain features of the natural world". Creationists
repeatedly quote the claims that Karl Popper made at one time in his career
that evolutionary theory as set out by the Darwinians is not a genuine
scientific theory. Johnson acknowledges that later Popper backed away
from this position, not because he realized that he was mistaken but
because he was "besieged by indignant Darwinist protests". Johnson also
implies that Patterson "eventually disavowed the whole business" after he
"came under heavy fire from Darwinists". Anyone who knows Sir Karl or
Colin Patterson is likely to doubt Johnson's psychological reconstruction.
Neither man is easily bullied.

Why are even the scientists who are most sceptical of Darwinian versions
of evolutionary theory nevertheless forced to accept evolution? Johnson's
answer is their commitment to naturalism. Evolution is the only viable
naturalistic explanation for the structure of the living world, and
scientists are committed to naturalistic explanations. They are willing to
entertain naturalistic explanations as well as those set out by Darwinians but
not reference to miracles, God's plan, or guiding forces. As inadequate as
sexual selection may or may not be as an explanation of the peacock's tail,
it is preferable to Johnson's explanation in terms of a "whimsical Creator".

Johnson finds the commitment of scientists to totally naturalistic
explanations dogmatic and close-minded, but scientists have no choice.
Once they allow reference to God or miraculous forces to explain the first
origin of life or the evolution of the human species, they have no way of
limiting this sort of explanation. Why does the Earth have a magnetic field,
why do organisms use only laevo amino acids, why is the savings and loan
industry in such trouble? It is eases enough to answer that these
phenomena are all part of God's great plan, but in the absence of some
partially independent knowledge of God and His intentions, such
explanations are no less vacuous than the usual parodies of the principle of
survival of the fittest.

The compromise that scientists and theologians have hammered out
through the years is that science and religion, when properly construed,
cannot conflict. However, this compromise works only if neither side
pushes too hard. Advocates of evolutionary ethics transgress this boundary
from one side; natural theologians from the other. Advocates of
evolutionary ethics claim to provide totally naturalistic explanations of
ethics, whereas natural theologians acknowledge inferential relations
between God and His handiwork. If the Universe is a perfectly running
clock one sort of God is implied. If, at bottom natural processes are
indeterministic and the basic regularities in the Universe are a function of
the contingencies of its origin, quite another God is implied The problem
that biological evolution poses for natural theologians is the sort L of God
that a Darwinian version of evolution implies.

What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by
the species on Darwin's Galapagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife
with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste. death, pain and horror.
Millions of sperm and ova are produced that never unite to form a zygote.
Of the millions of zygotes that are produced, only a few ever reach
maturity. On current estimates, 95 per cent of the DNA that an organism
contains has no function. Certain organic systems are marvels of
engineering; others are little more than contraptions. When the eggs that
cuckoos lay in the nests of other birds hatch, the cuckoo chick proceeds to
push the eggs of its foster parents out of the nest. The queens of a
particular species of parasitic ant have only one remarkable adaptation, a
serrated appendage which they use to saw off the head of the host queen.
To quote Darwin, "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and
omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with
the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of
caterpillars."

Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural
history may be like, He is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not.
He is also not a loving God who cares about His productions. He is not
even the awful God portrayed in the book of Job. The God of the
Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is
certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.

Johnson dedicates his book in part to "those brave souls" like himself who
asked the hard questions even when there was never a chance of getting a
straight answer; and to those in science who want to allow the questions to
be asked." The questions that Johnson asks have been asked over and over
again. Most have received very straight answers. Others are still moot. If
any scientists have tried to keep these questions from being asked, they
have failed miserably. Johnson's problem is that he does not like the
answers that he hears. He wants evolutionary biologists to include reference
to God in their professional writings in the way that he, I presume, does in
his. If Johnson had written a religiously motivated criticism of
thermodynamics, quantum theory or plate tectonics, it might have been
worth reading, but I cannot imagine why any one would want to read yet
another rehash of creationist objections to evolutionary theory.

David L. Hull is in the Department of Philosophy, Northwestem University,
Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA.

(Hull D.L., "The God of the Galapagos." Review of "Darwin on Trial," by
Phillip E. Johnson, Regnery Gateway: Washington DC, 1991. Nature
Vol. 352, 8 August 1991, pp.485-486)
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"David Hull, who reviewed my book Darwin on Trial for Nature, employed
precisely this reasoning. First, he reformulated my skeptical arguments
about the blind watchmaker thesis as a demand that evolutionary biologists
`include references to God in their professional writings.' (It would have
been much more accurate to say that I urge them to cease making explicit
or implicit references to God.) Hull responds that for scientists to admit the
possibility of supernatural creation would be to abandon both science and
reason. ... Hull's review did not present any scientific evidence on the
crucial point at issue, which is whether the blind watchmaker really has the
power to do all the necessary creating. Such evidence is unnecessary,
according to Hull's implicit logic, because an explanation of the blind
watchmaker type is the only possibility acceptable to science. Even if the
Darwinian theory of today is imperfect, as Hull concedes it to be, it is
nonetheless the best naturalistic theory currently available and therefore, by
definition, the closest approximation to truth which is available to us.
Criticism of the kind provided in Darwin on Trial is thus inherently beside
the point, and need not be taken seriously. ... Of course, evolutionary
biologists do not in fact omit references to God from their professional
writings. On the contrary, Richard Dawkins, Douglas Futuyma, George
Gaylord Simpson, and David Hull himself are absolutely typical in that they
address the subject of God explicitly and repeatedly, for the purpose of
justifying their assumption that a Creator does not exist. They could hardly
do otherwise. If God exists, and is able and willing to do the job of
creating, then it would be foolish to assume that He remained inactive in
deference to the wishes of naturalistic philosophers of science. Because
there is no positive evidence that the blind watchmaker can create complex
biological systems, the defenders of Darwinism must establish that no other
possibility needs to be considered. And so David Hull like all the others
dives straight into theology, and comes up with some well known
arguments against the existence of God. God (at least in the Christian
sense) does not exist, writes Hull in his concluding paragraphs, because the
world we live in is not the kind of world that God ought to have created. ...
Faced with answering a critique of the scientific evidence for Darwinism,
the reviewer for Nature, the most prestigious organ of the scientific
establishment, changes the subject and brings God directly into the
argument. The blind watchmaker must be responsible for creation because
the world looks cruel and wasteful to the selective vision of a Darwinist.
The essential premise of this utterly unscientific argument is that a world
created by God would have to be a world in which waste and cruelty are
totally absent. Why should those of us who dispute that premise permit
biologists and atheistic historians of science to shield it from criticism by
pretending to have expert knowledge about what God would have done?"
(Johnson P.E., "Disestablishing Naturalism," 1992 Founder's Lectures,
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Revised, February 17, 1992.
http://www.apologetics.org/articles/founder3.html)
Stephen E. Jones http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Moderator: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CreationEvolutionDesign
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